Moving From Vision to Engagement With Prospects
A conversation between Sean Murphy and William Pietri about the challenges of moving from vision to engagement with prospects.
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The Business is Everyone’s Business (Part 2)
To grow the business founders must assess the task relevant maturity of each employee’s experience with a particular task to manage them effectively.
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The Business is Everyone’s Business
Startups face time pressure and resource scarcity, they need to cultivate effective collaboration among everyone on the team to compensate. They need to act as if the business is everyone’s business. Jack Stack’s “The Great Game of Business” offers some useful models for fostering a shared understanding of the current challenges to enable effective joint
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Listening to Customers
Jensen Huang: “Sometimes you have to ignore your customers and follow Moore’s Law.” But acknowledging Moore’s Law is listening to customers.
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Recurring Problems Have Both Technical and Psychological Roots
Recurring Problems Have Both Technical and Psychological Roots I got an e-mailed question from someone who had watched my “The Limits of I’ll Know It When I See It” video. Q: In your talk you say “Most recurring problems are a combination of an unsolved technical problem and an unresolved emotional component to that problem.”
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Matt Perez on How Nearsoft Leverages Yammer
An interview with Matt Perez on how Nearsoft leverages Yammer and other collaboration tools to enable them to keep distributed teams providing development services and ongoing support in sync.
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Bootstrappers Breakfast® Invites Milpitas Entrepreneurs to “Eat Problems for Breakfast”
Given Milpitas’ strong commitment to entrepreneurship and new business development, the Bootstrappers Breakfast promise of serious early morning discussions among bootstrappers will have many local entrepreneurs feeling right at home. The focus of the monthly meeting is on technology businesses whose next stage of growth is based on internal cash flow and organic profits. Entrepreneurs
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Early Proposals: Avoiding Consulting for Free
Avoiding consulting for free is possible if you use using every conversation to explore client’s needs. Don’t solve a hard problem before an agreement on payment.
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Quotes for Entrepreneurs – February 2010
You can follow @skmurphy to get these quotes for entrepreneurs hot off the mojo wire or wait until the end of the month when they are collected on the blog. Enter your E-mail if you would like new blog posts to your inbox.
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Use Wikis for Team Projects
Wikis dissolve voice and authorship. Use them where there are rewards and incentives at a team level, where a team is being held accountable for a result. Blogs and forums preserve voice and authorship. Use them where knowing who said what is important. Start with frequently updated information that is also frequently accessed: Meeting agendas
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EDA Chiefs Hazard No Guesses on 2010 Market
I covered the EDAC CEO Panel last Thursday for EETimes, what follows is a copy of the article I wrote for them “EDA Chiefs Hazard No Guesses on 2010 Market (02/19/2010 7:12 PM EST)” It differs from the version on-line at EET only in that I have added some links for context. SAN JOSE, Calif.—With
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Iron Bars, Plexiglass, and Masking Tape
An actual dream I had of a tiger prowling a maze where some walls are iron bars, others are plexiglass, and strips of masking tape seem to bar some paths. I later realized it was a metaphor for three kinds of barriers that entrepreneurs need to navigate as they get a new business established.
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Better, Impossible, and Unthinkable Products
I think that there are better, impossible, and unthinkable products. Better products are “15 minutes ahead.” Impossible products relax one or two design key constraints. Unthinkable products restructure the design pattern or paradigm to achieve an unprecedented result.
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George Grellas Answers Questions at Feb-16 Bootstrapper Breakfast in Sunnyvale
Join us tomorrow, Tuesday, February 16, in Sunnyvale where George Grellas will present a short legal guide for entrepreneurs. George is a veteran Silicon Valley startup business lawyer who heads a boutique firm that specializes in early-stage technology startups. Since 1984, as a founders’ lawyer, George has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs in helping them
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Customer Development Helps Entrepreneurs Assess the Value of an Invention
Colin Cherry in “The Telephone System: Creator of Mobility and Social Change” makes the point that the full impact of an invention is very difficult to predict.
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New Firms in Silicon Valley
Companies names have sure changed in the last year or so. I was noticing today how many signs outside of office buildings seem to be branch offices for these firms: Move In Now First Month Free Your Name Here Available for Lease Space for Rent Here are two directories that list available office space for
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I Don’t Understand, We Won the Argument, Why Didn’t We Win The Sale?
It’s Rare That You Are Actually Bringing Fire To The Savages If you think you are so much smarter than your customers that you are “bringing fire to the savages” you will find it hard to learn from them and hard to actually close deals. What follows are three true stories. We Won The Argument,
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Verdafero Profiled by SJ BizJournal “Sustainability Planning Over the Web”
I was pleased to see Verdafero profiled in Feb-5-2010 “The Pitch” column of the San Jose Business Journal. The article, “Palo Alto’s Verdafero Offers Sustainability Planning Over the Web,” ran in the February 5th print edition. We have been advising Verdafero since 2008.
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Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model for Expert Entrepreneurs
Update Feb-24-2011: Since I first wrote this in 2010 the Effectuation.Org site has been considerably upgraded and contains a lot more information on research on entrepreneurship by Saras Sarasvathy. Recapping ideas, papers, and books that had changed my life yesterday reminded me of Saras Sarasvathy’s Effectual Reasoning Model from her 2001 paper “What Makes Entrepreneurs
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Articles, Ideas, and Books That Made Me a Better Entrepreneur
This is a start articulating a set of resources for entrepreneurs that are for the most part not yet widely appreciated as applicable to entrepreneurship but that have had a significant impact on my perspective. I welcome any suggestions or lists from readers for what has influenced you, and opened you to new perspectives on your
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